Backtracking Under Scrutiny: Evidence and Regulation in the WTO

Governments frequently revise or withdraw proposed regulations that function as trade barriers, even though the WTO’s adjudicative system has weakened and compliance is no longer legally enforced. I argue that the WTO retains authority because it operates as an epistemic regime in which states care about how their regulatory behavior is perceived by peers. Rather than relying on formal dispute rulings, the system now works through reputational signaling and peer scrutiny: governments attach scientific, technical, and risk-assessment documents to TBT and SPS notifications to demonstrate that a measure is legitimate rather than protectionist. Crucially, disclosure is not binary. Both too little and too much documentation undermine credibility: sparse evidence signals weak justification, but very large dossiers appear defensive and raise suspicion. I theorize a non-linear “Goldilocks” dynamic in which moderate evidence sustains plausible deniability and minimizes the incentive to modify, while no evidence and extensive evidence both invite challenge and ultimately increase modification. I formalize this mechanism through a continuous-evidence signaling game with endogenous modification and illustrate its logic with a feasibility probe using WTO litigation data. To further test expectations, I analyze 66,231 TBT and SPS notifications (2010–2024), using page counts of supporting documents interacted with import penetration as a proxy for protectionist incentives. The results confirm the predicted U-shape: conditional on protectionist pressure, notifications with either minimal or extremely large evidence packages are significantly more likely to be modified than those with mid-sized evidence. EU comments–response data (2018–2023) provide micro-level support: receiving a comment increases the likelihood of modification by 176 percent, and medium-evidence notifications attract the fewest comments. This evidence speaks directly to how international organizations maintain authority and legitimacy under conditions of disruption—especially when formal enforcement collapses. The WTO’s ability to induce regulatory change now hinges on reputational governance: governments anticipate how other members will evaluate the credibility of their evidence and adjust their behavior accordingly. Even in a weakened legal environment, member states continue to monitor each other, issue comments, and scrutinize regulatory justifications, creating reputational costs for measures that appear insufficiently or excessively substantiated. This peer-generated pressure allows the WTO to preserve a meaningful degree of influence, not through judicial sanctions but through epistemic expectations about what “legitimate” regulation looks like. The findings show that institutional authority can persist through informational discipline, demonstrating that IOs remain consequential even in the face of system-wide disruption, great-power disengagement, and judicial paralysis. International rules endure not by coercion, but because states still care how they are perceived within an epistemic community that defines and polices regulatory legitimacy.